Star Trek V Press Conference

[trevanian]

Chris3123 said:
I thought you were talking about Shatner making a press conference apoligizing to the world for making the movie.

I will take that seriously a few centuries after Nimoy offers me an apology for his directorial work, and how he justified going out on stage to shoot that sorry excuse for a script that Bennett vomited out on SFS.

 

[Kegek]

^
TSFS isn't so bad, especially when compared to TFF. I like it more than TVH, actually, though I think that the TOS film series is more or less one of diminishing returns until it hits the fifth movie, and from TFF there's nowhere to go but up.

Samuel T. Cogley said:
Agreed.

It was torture.

It went like this:

Shatner: "George Takei... Nichelle Nichols..."

Shatner walks over to Koenig and pauses for just a little too long.

Shatner: "And the gentleman who plays Chekov."

Torture? That's priceless! Can anyone find this on youtube or whatever?

 

[trevanian]

Kegek said:
^
TSFS isn't so bad, especially when compared to TFF. I like it more than TVH, actually, though I think that the TOS film series is more or less one of diminishing returns until it hits the fifth movie, and from TFF there's nowhere to go but up.

I rank the Nimoy-directed films along with NEM and FC at the bottom of the features, both in rewatchability and entertainment value (TMP and TWOK and TFF at the top, with the rest in the middle.)

I find particular fault with SFS because I see it as the picture with the most potential, and so it squanders the most. You've got moments that are so right ... and then you've got insulting plotting and really pathetic attempts to reprise the stuff that worked in TWOK.

I know that Nimoy didn't have any particular clout as director on SFS (he used up his clout getting the gig), but taking David's death on stage as scripted seems to me to be an abdication of responsibility, especially given how much he pushed to get other parts of HIS vision into the thing (re: vulcans and such.)

Treating that death as a radio broadcast, instead of putting it up on the main viewscreen for Kirk to witness (and witness at length), basically makes ANY reaction of Shatner's seem a little inappropriate, and the big fall (which is one of the things that totally fails to work for me) is extremely out of scale, coming on the heels of hearing a flat 'david is dead' on a speaker. I've seen actors give performances in those circumstances that actually work, but they are few and far between. Plus the very good reaction shots of Doohan and Kelley further undercut the Shatner histrionics (shatneronics?) Again, squandered potential.

The plotting, such as it is, with respect to beaming down to a disintegrating planet instead of beaming to the BOP and then having to destroy the E himself to keep the klingon boarding party from getting Genesis (which would have had tremendous emotional weight, with Kirk having to kill his own dog with a series of shots), is something I've addressed in about a hundred other posts.

Ditto for the 'aging with the planet, but he stops aging when removed from the planet' stuff. And TWOK's sneak attack being reversed into the BOP sneaking up on the E fails miserably, because Nimoy doesn't do any inventive shooting and used few cutaways (play the Reliant/Enterprise sequence on one tv set and the E/BOP one on the other and you'll really see what I mean, it is like one was made by somebody who knew what went into a movie and the other was made by somebody with a shot list and no imagination) and only has the Horner rehash to hype the non-action. And all the "you're going to have to bring us up there to get it" stuff is TWOK's "you'll have to come down here Khan" again.

Yet you've got the wonderful moment with Kirk's "I hear you" with Morrow ... I see a whole different movie when I see the good stuff in it. That's what gets me angry about it (besides the basic issue of bringing Spock back to life in the first place, which I'm never too happy about.)

But then you have the ILM/STAR WARSification of Trek with the fx, which provide spectacle but at the cost of the Trek universe. The designs, with the exception of the BOP (which is really just a winged version of the ship the same folks at ILM designed for EXPLORERS) don't work for me at all, especially spacedock.

I'm sure a lot of folks here would use the same kinds of justifications for knocking TFF that I use for SFS, but to me the moments that work in TFF far outweigh the ludicrous stuff (the turbolift number thing is a lot less annoying to me than the quality of snow in SFS, for example.)

 

[Kegek]

trevanian said:
I rank the Nimoy-directed films along with NEM and FC at the bottom of the features, both in rewatchability and entertainment value (TMP and TWOK and TFF at the top, with the rest in the middle.)

I agree about TVH, but not TSFS. I find that pretty rewatchable, and considerably more so than TFF. I've always felt TSFS worked a lot better than it had any right to: It was the movie where Spock came back, basically because Nimoy had changed his mind about wanting to leave the franchise. It had no right to be anything other than the lamest, most dramatically vacuous and contrived film as far as this premise is concerned. This kind of reversal is pretty much the antithesis of anything resembling drama in most cases.

But it makes a serious and concerted effort to make the proceedings dramatic, by in part making it about getting Spock back, not merely giving him to us (it's Nimoy's smallest acting role in the film saga), and by having the crew risk their careers, and lose both the Enterprise and David Marcus. I think it handles David's death quite well; for Shatner's reaction they clearly had TWOK in mind. It finds what drama it has both in having the crew - and Kirk - make sacrifices, and by making Spock's return the goal of an arduous journey. The film's attitude and repetition of phrases have always made me think of it as a kind of a companion piece to TWOK - far more than TVH is the conclusion of any trilogy.

It doesn't always pull its intended emotional resonance off, and it's got plot holes you could drive the Excelsior through, but it's a lot better than TVH or TFF. Sure, there's the incredibly convenient Genesis planet, Horner's rehashed score, and Shateronics are an acquired taste at best. As for Nimoy's direction, I'd call it competent - he films the script and doesn't mess it up. He's no Robert Wise or Nicholas Meyer, but he's not William Shatner either.

As far as SFX goes... they're good. In fact, they're not just good, they pretty much defined a lot of the Star Trek 'look' for the next decade, where the Starbase, the Excelsior, and the Klingon Bird of Prey would make repeated appearances in both subsequent films and in TNG, DS9, and VOY. Even the Grissom and the Merchantman have a respectable post-film careers. It's certainly very Star Wars in aesthetic, but I don't think that's a bad thing - and just about every frame of outer space and starships in TSFS is a damn sight better than any equivalent in TFF.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Shatner forgetting Koenig's name is one of the classic PR f---ups in Trek history.

 

[trevanian]

No argument on that last sentence, but to be fair, even SPACEBALLS and those Corman space flicks of the era have much better fx than TFF.

I just find the ILM/SW aesthetic of that era to be at odds with what had been established by Taylor/Trumbull/Probert/Minor (an odd mix there to be sure) on the first two features, and personally I'll take spaceframes over orbiting blimp hangars any day (then again, I actually find REAL spacecraft to be beautiful as well ... there's a new book with Wally Schirra on the cover that does NASA's first 50 years, and a few of the very best spacecraft and spacestations in daylight pics ever snapped are in there.)

 

[Kegek]

trevanian said:
I just find the ILM/SW aesthetic of that era to be at odds with what had been established by Taylor/Trumbull/Probert/Minor (an odd mix there to be sure) on the first two features,

At odds, indeed, but that doesn't mean it's a bad aesthetic - IMHO. Different, admittedly not as good; but still very interesting. The really questionable aesthetic decisions lay still in the future. The Excelsior looks nice, the Excelsior with a giant bulge added on just so there can be something to cut open without damaging the model does not.

 

[Jon1701]

Gah!

Dammit, Sam. I'd almost forgotten about the whole thing. This entire thread forced me to revisit the Trek V special features.

For extra torture, has anyone checked out Harve Bennetts Sales pitch? Why they felt a need to present that as an extra makes even less sense. Regurgitating some Yiddish/Vulcan hand salute crap that Leonard Nimoy scribbled on the back of a fag packet one afternoon.

"The Best Damn Sales force in the business...You know what this means? It means you cannot tell a lie...And when you are telling the truth..."

No wonder the picture made no fucking money.

 

[trevanian]

Kegek said:

trevanian said:
I just find the ILM/SW aesthetic of that era to be at odds with what had been established by Taylor/Trumbull/Probert/Minor (an odd mix there to be sure) on the first two features,

At odds, indeed, but that doesn't mean it's a bad aesthetic - IMHO. Different, admittedly not as good; but still very interesting. The really questionable aesthetic decisions lay still in the future. The Excelsior looks nice, the Excelsior with a giant bulge added on just so there can be something to cut open without damaging the model does not.

I think the E-b in GEN looks better than the EXCELSIOR, but that may just be a matter of packaging it in that particular film (it has the nice drydock to frame it) and lighting.

There's an old CFQ article from 87 or so that makes a crack about EXCELSIOR that it looks like a tube of toothpaste being mercilessly squeezed, at least around the engineering hull. To me, it looks like an inverted John Berkey spaceship painting with a saucer added. Normally, I'm a big huge enormous fan of Berkey, but not this time.

I find the ILM-designed stuff to be the point of no return for Trek (at least up until DS9 or so, when Jim Martin and others did some interesting work.) I thought their tricorders were ludicrous (though to be fair the props in TMP and TWOK were no great shakes either), and the idea of letting the visual effects company have such influence on a live-action production seems like tail wagging dog (TMP and Abel, anybody?) ILM could at least deliver the goods, so that separates them from others, but based on TWOK, I think they were better working from other people's designs (like RELIANT), and messed stuff up when they started messing with other people's designs (like Minor's Genesis cave, which they turned into a real mess with very mixed-quality matte shots.)

 

[Kegek]

trevanian said:
I think the E-b in GEN looks better than the EXCELSIOR, but that may just be a matter of packaging it in that particular film (it has the nice drydock to frame it) and lighting.

It's the redesign specificially I'm not keen on, the presentation is fine.

(at least up until DS9 or so, when Jim Martin and others did some interesting work.)

Such as? When I come to think of it, the show was fairly sparse on new designs (taking liberally from TNG and the TOS movies). Aside from the Defiant and DS9, the two signature pieces of the show, the only interesting design I recall was the intentionally scarab like Jem'Hadar warships, and the Bajoran solar explorer.

 

[trevanian]

I think Martin did the Defiant, and he did a wonderful (unused) design for a Gorn ship. (he did some awesome stuff that wasn't used for ALIEN RESURRECTION too, so I think maybe I'm thinking of some of those, they may have appeared in the same article with the gorn ship art.) I also liked some of those little scrap ships that were built first for DS9 but turned up on TNG and VOY, I think there was one called the maquis fighter (something with a REASON for wings.)

I liked the runabout and the Jem'Hadar ship too, but then there were some later ships that were way too busy (the big big klingon ship model, and the breen ship by Eaves, which was CG-only.)

Part of the appeal with the DS9 stuff is the lighting, which had less fill light than TNG, so practically all the ships looked better to me, even the galaxy.

 

[Kegek]

trevanian said:
I also liked some of those little scrap ships that were built first for DS9 but turned up on TNG and VOY, I think there was one called the maquis fighter (something with a REASON for wings.)

Yeah, I know the one. It was certainly unconventional for a Star Trek design, it's about as close as it came to a 'starfighter', like the X-Wing of Star Wars or the starfuries on B5, though it was still of a rather larger size to distance itself from that type of vessel. Like the runabout it occupies a kind of middle ground.

But, to be fair as far as reasons go... the only reason the Enterprise had a flying saucer is because of that design's popularity in pulp; normally attributed to aliens due to UFO lore, but appropriated as a human ship in such films as Forbidden Planet.

 

[Samuel T. Cogley]

jon1701 said:
"The Best Damn Sales force in the business...You know what this means? It means you cannot tell a lie...And when you are telling the truth..."

No wonder the picture made no fucking money.

Yeah, that was horrible, too.

I generally like Harve Bennett, but that "sales pitch" made me want to reach into the television and smack him.

It was like he was saying, "Okay, little lemmings, we did our part. We made a movie and called it Star Trek. Now, it's time for you to do your part. You need to watch it 100 times, even if it's a piece of shit. Because that's what you do. What we tell you to do."

 

[Maurice]

^^^I'd be okay with wings if, for ONCE, they were actually shaped like airfoils. These space fighters always have fat slab wings that would provide as much lift as brick, and littered with greeblies that would add drag and create turbulence.

 

[137th Gebirg]

I don't know - never liked the E-B variant, but the Excelsior design overall has grown on me over the years. Anyone remember when it first came out and it was called the "pregnant guppy"?

 

[misskim86]

I saw the DVD extra and I didn't think it was so awkward, Shatner is very good at working an audience

 

[wekkuli]

Samuel T. Cogley said:
And Ralph Winter's curly mullet and accompanying rainbow/vomit sweater... Yikes!

Well, that was only the golden 80's.
I myself found the press conference pretty interesting and hilarious. The nostalgia value is great and it's definitely worth watching.

As for the press scene in Generations - I think they wanted the movie be as casual as possible. They clearly wanted to play it safe with all those oldship/bar/xmas things. They appeal most to the public and make people feel more comfortable. "First Contact" was quite opposite and concentrated more on action, I dunno why.